When the Libertarians muse about personal liberty, I’m on their side…
The Drug Crisis by Harry Browne: Few people are aware that before World War I, a 9-year-old girl could walk into a drug store and buy heroin.
That’s right — heroin. She didn’t need a doctor’s prescription or a note from her parents. She could buy it right off the shelf. Bayer and other large drug companies sold heroin as a pain-reliever and sedative in measured doses — just the way aspirin is sold today. Cocaine, opium, and marijuana were readily available as well. No Drug Enforcement Agency, no undercover cops, no ‘Parents – the Anti-Drug’ commercials. Just people going about their own business is whatever way they chose.
Seeing today’s never-ending crisis of teenagers using drugs, you can imagine how bad it must have been when there were no laws to stop children — or adults — from using drugs. But, in fact, there was no drug crisis at all. A few people were addicted to heroin or cocaine, just as a few people today are addicted to sleeping pills or Big Macs, but there was no national uproar about it.
…it’s when they start advocating for corporate liberty that they lose me. Business and markets are predatory creatures — they aggressively fight competitors and seek self-preservation first and reproduction (profits) second. Like any eco-system, the predators must be balanced by outside forces, in the case of this tortured metaphor, that would be nature (government). Without regulatory restrictions, corporations will cannibalize one another, merging and acquiring, until all stores are WalMart and all restaurants are Taco Bell (I’ve been watching too many bad Stallone sci-fi movies…)
The ironic thing about the neo-con’s dream of dismantling regulatory restrictions on the predators (like tort reform, social security piratization, permanent tax cuts for the rich, etc.) is that they forget about the other way that nature wipes out huge predators — by providing too few prey to maintain the balance. What happens to big business when most of the customers are too poor to continue consuming? The handwriting is on the wall — Christmas-time shopping was at perilously-low levels, except for the makers of luxury goods.
